LocalGov Digital promises to increase council collaboration

LocalGov Digital, a network for digital practitioners in local government, has launched its “Pipeline” scheme, intending to build partnerships between local government organisations.

The project is one of three pilots from the LocalGov Digital Makers, the part of the body that develops and designs digital services.

Pipeline aims to enable collaboration between councils by allowing them to publish details of future projects or concepts for others to find them.

The initiative is currently in its “alpha” phase, acting as a “wiki” for those working in and around local governments to publish project and concept details, while interested partners can search for this information by description, date, state and language.

LocalGov Digital hopes that future versions of Pipeline will add the ability for users to express interest in a project, calendar views, views by organisation and more.

Local governments are buying the same things

By encouraging local government to work in this way, the organisation hopes to break the “cycle” of local governments developing and buying the same products separately because they will now be able to better co-ordinate work.

“It’s important to be clear about the scope of Pipeline. It’s not a tool to enable discussions, there are already plenty of places for this and these can be referenced in the wiki,” claimed LocalGov Digital.

“Nor is it a place for storing code, there seems little sense in creating another GitHub through Pulse, another of the pilot projects that aims to help people find code easier,” it added.

The organisation urges the wider community to get involved in order to create a new way of working for local governments.